Buffalo LinkStation Live 500GB in Storage appliances

Peruse the LinkStation Live's modest specs and there's little to excite at first glance. It boasts a single 500GB, 7,200rpm drive with 16MB cache, and just one Gigabit Ethernet socket and a single USB port at the rear.

Unlike the LaCie, the LinkStation Live has more up its sleeve than just a DLNa-certified UPnP media server and FTP support, though. The USB port isn't only capable of backing up to and from storage devices, including digital cameras and camcorders, but it's also able to share a USB printer over your home or office network. Factor in scheduled backups to USB hard disk, timed power-down/startup, remote web access and a BitTorrent client for managing hefty downloads and you've got a fully featured NAS drive for not much cash.

Initially, we had a few problems with the software not detecting the drive, but a swift reinstall quickly got us back on track. Bundled software includes NASNavigator 2 for detecting the drive on the network and browsing shares, as well as Memeo Backup for carrying out scheduled backups from host PCs.

There are limitations. The single 500GB drive can't compete with the best when it comes to transfer speeds, but it still finds itself well ahead of the LaCie. The Buffalo managed to write 3GB of small files at 9MB/sec and read them back at a reasonably nippy 16MB/sec, while large files were written at 12MB/sec and read back at 19MB/sec.

These won't be major considerations for those looking for a cheap NAS drive. The solid feature set, however, means the LinkStation Live will be a dependable choice for many.

Author: Sasha Muller